We've come along to Asus's press conference, the first of CES. Let's get this ball rolling! Times are as it happened in PST, so not contemporary to this moment.

14:11: Johnny Shih of Asus up on the stage. Thanks for being here with him! At this unofficial event. (Not that he's saying that.) 2010 was an amazing year for Asus, apparently. He doesn't specify why.

Asus makes products from notebooks to motherboards. He makes much of being green. Journalists stop typing in reverence, or possibly the hope he'll say something more interesting.

He's working the Steve Jobs trope, by walking back and forth and talking slowly, but it's not quite as compelling. "We were rated by many third parties as the most reliable computer." Had 3.5% of computers shipped in the US but came out top in reliability, according to Rescue. Three-year return rate better according to Squaretrade.

Claims to be third worldwide in "portable PCs". What's a portable PC defined as? Netbooks aren't a very healthy segment just now. Zipping through these slides so quickly we can't pick up the numbers on them even though they're apparently showing great growth compared to Dell, HP, etc.

Then he offers a bizarre diagram, with two axes: on the Y-axis, innovation; on the X-axis, choice. Apple is positioned high on Y (ie, lots of innovation) but short on the X (not much choice). Asus he plots with lots of X (choice) but not much Y (innovation). Quite whose fault that is, is not established. But he says he wants to put Asus at the lots of innovation, lots of choice point. Well, let's see what you've got.

14:20: I'm hoping that CES will improve from here on out, because this is already both surreal and boring.

He has a picture of a laptop. It's got a spillproof keyboard, scratch-resistant casing of its pro keyboard. "So you can see we can offer different sorts of choices." Possibly.

14:21: "And now the main thing today – innovation in the cloud". EEE is their watchword: easy to learn, work and play. Let's hope Mars (as in the bars) isn't feeling litigious. It sounds so close, as a slogan, to work, rest and play.

And he produces… "The first member of our EeePad memo family." Hmm, it's a tablet running Android which looks like a 7in screen and a … oh, no, it's got a stylus. (Though the specs later say it's a capacitive, not resistive, screen.) He zips through the specs after having posed for ages for the pictures. Nobody is able to write them down. Later emerges: priced $499-$699 (no idea what determines the price). To ship: June. (Picture at Crunchgear.)

See, this is where he needs to study Steve Jobs: you tell people about the specs and then you show it off.

Distinct lack of "oooh" from the (really quite big) audience of journalists here.

14:24: "And now the world's most powerful tablet... The most professional power, the full Windows productivity, this is it. No compromise. It's a PC but it's not very PC." It's the Eee Slate EP121. Look more excited at the back at the name, can't you?

14:26: Someone called Gary from Asus's Texan office is demonstrating. He's going to Photoshop a photo he took at Christmas. Notable that he is doing it with a stylus rather than with his fingers. When you see someone demoing a Windows tablet, watch very carefully what input method they choose. It will tell you a great deal. Here, it tells us that fingers are still not recommended input devices for Windows on a tablet.

He's running the A-Team film in the background because he can. Doesn't everyone run a film in the background while they're Photoshopping? No? Obvious stock photo of a model ("she gets her beauty from her mother"). He's filtering it, resizing it, saving it, emailing it, but still using the stylus. Noticeable that he hasn't used his fingers even for a moment; instead he's doing it with the handwriting recognition.

Obvious question: why the hell would you buy a tablet to do a laptop's job? What's the price delta of this compared to a laptop with similar capabilities?

14:30: People afterwards doubt whether it would get three hours' battery life, given that it contains an i5. Still, it would make a very nice lapwarmer.

Next: "Smart mobility meets casual computing." It's a laptop: the Transformer. Quite a thin one. Ah: the screen detaches from the keyboard, and the picture continues. Well, that's because the keyboard is the add-on, I guess. (Shih hasn't explained if that's why.)

Yes, seems the keyboard is a docking station. (Picture at Crunchgear.) $399 without the keyboard (er, why would you want it without the useful-looking keyboard?) or $699 with it (what! a $300 keyboard?).

"EeePad Transformer. Its thickness is less than iPad. Two cameras. It can run full 1080p playback. Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core processor" (that's good) "twice the performance of the iPad A4." Well OK then, show us doing it. Don't just claim it. Ah – demo again.

14:34: Will it be the EeePad against the iPad? Oh, no. It's Gary the Texan again, showing the Android interface and Asus's apps that it's written. DLNA networking to connect to home servers. "Network guys tell me there are so many wireless devices here that the speeds are down," he says and glares at the audience. Well, excuse us for coming along to your press conference.

14:36: So in theory Asus is betting that people will want a really powerful tablet that can be a laptop, or possibly laptop that can be a tablet. It's a nice idea. Except it's an Android tablet, which means that the whole benefits of having a keyboard go away somewhat: Android doesn't run Office, nor even OpenOffice, nor anything you'd identify as a program that can edit Word, Excel or Powerpoint files.

And if it were a Windows tablet, then you'd have the nightmare of its multi-touch unresponsiveness when it was a tablet. It seems such a solid, attractive idea: you have a device where hey! It's a laptop! No! Now it's a tablet! But those two functions each require a different approach, a different operating system. Tablets are not laptops with the keyboard taken away, and laptops are not tablets with an added keyboard.

Asus EeePad Slider – for when you can't quite bear not to have a tablet that isn't a laptop? PR

14:38: Next up: the EeePad Slider, "a unique hybrid of tablet and portable PC … so you've got a keyboard all the time." Already I'm starting to think that Asus doesn't itself know what people want, and is throwing designs at the world in the hope that one of them will prove popular. Is this a good idea? True, there's a risk in only offering one design: you might pick the wrong horse.

But having four different designs? A 7in Android tablet, a 12in Windows tablet, a sometimes-tablet, a never-quite-a-tablet? OK, Shih said that he wants to offer the combination of innovation and choice, but this feels a bit scattered. Offering all of those products, with the different combinations of SKUs (product models) – different RAM, different storage – is the sort of thing that drives supply chain managers up the wall because they can't forecast who'll want what, which inevitably leads to oversupply in some places and shortages (you hope) in others. This is why multiple products that do roughly the same thing is a bad idea: because it leaves you with excess inventory which either has to be sold off or sent to landfill, and either way wrecks your financials.

14:40: Gary the Texan is back to show it off. "I feel like I'm living up here," he says from the stage. Can't quite express how monotone his monotone is. Supremely underwhelming showing of what ought to be amazing: Honeycomb? In the wild? But we're shown nothing that suggests this is really Honeycomb on the machine. It could be Android 2.2. We'd be none the wiser from the demo.

14:43: Shih is talking about something vague to do with the cloud and web 2.0 under the title "Triple-Play Digit-Net" (that's what it says on the slide). I don't honestly know what his point is here. It's like when Bill Gates tried to explain the cloud with the worst slide in the world. "Together with the silicon brain, together with the human brain, that's the best of Web 2.0," says Shih. To utter silence.

14:46: "We can put the silicon brain into things … but their aim is always to serve PEOPLE!" I'm not quite following. "Where are your friends, where is the parking space... I think this is the real concept of web 2.0." Really, Mr Shih?

"And here I'd like to introduce another concept... through the concept of the interface make the whole of the family … I think each home may need a home CIO." Oh dear – isn't that what good user interface design is meant to make redundant? "Including videoconferencing.. where you go outside and create a video." I'm going to stop typing for a bit until he rejoins the planet.

14:51: Ah. We're back. Short film. "IRIS: Inspirational Research for Immersive Space … what if the device adapts to your work space?" Yes, it's the home of the future – just like that thing you've been seeing for, ooh, the past 50 years. It seems to involve a wristwatch that has a detachable screen that can be blown up into a tablet the size of an iPad. That's not far away at all, is it?

14:53: And he's gone, and we're done. We're perplexed as hell, and we haven't even been given the chance to ask questions. Nor, indeed, to get hands-on. (Ignore any Google results that say "hands-on" relating to this presentation: nobody except the Asus execs got their hands on these products.)

All the devices are being hurried off the stage. We later learn that every single device was taken straight out of the building immediately the talk had concluded – meaning there's no danger just yet of anyone getting their hands on them. Just as good: the electronic press kit handed out at the end includes a picture of the "Transformer", but it's a zero-byte file.

Overall? A strategy without a strategy. Asus doesn't control enough of the supply chain: it isn't improving Android, it can't write software worth a damn, and it's at the mercy of both Microsoft and Google in trying to advance its fortunes. Then again, the hardware-only business isn't that great: its Q3 2010 results suggest a profit margin of about 5% after tax (which is about half of what you'd aim for as a rule of thumb). Asus is stuck between a rock (Windows) and a hard place (Android); all it can hope for is that others will find it even harder.